Microsoft Research contributes to F# through the language design and Try F#.

F# is open source under an OSI-approved license (Apache 2.0) and is available across multiple platforms through the F# Software Foundation. You can contribute to F# in many ways, including through that organization.

Microsoft make free Visual F# Tools for Visual Studio and these tools are also included in Visual Studio Professional and Ultimate. This makes F# one of the few languages with both a strong open source community and a supported, professional product from Microsoft.

F# originated at Microsoft Research, Cambridge. The Microsoft Research team continues to partner with teams across Microsoft and with external open-source organizations, researchers, companies and users to break new ground in programming language systems, including F#. Microsoft Research staff continue to contribute to F#, its ecosystem and research based around F#.

F# is related to the design of Generics for .NET and thus owes a lot to Andrew Kennedy, who co-designed generics with Don Syme. Andrew is a co-designer of F#, being the designer and implementor of units-of-measure for F#.

Many research projects and prior language designs contain work relevant to F#, much of which has directly or indirectly influenced its design. Although F# is a complete re-implementation of a Caml-like language, a special thanks go to the Caml team, in particular Xavier Leroy, who agreed that a ‘Caml.NET’ was a good thing to do. Xavier and others also suggested we experiment with language design instead of just implementing OCaml, which ultimately led to many good things. Also thanks to Jacques Garrigue who gave some helpful positive feedback. The OCaml team’s work on both the language and the core foundations of programming remains an ongoing inspiration for us.

The F# team are especially grateful to members of other language communities who have been willing to give us advice about F# and to help us talk through aspects of the design. This includes Anders Hejlsberg, Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton-Jones, Phil Wadler, Mads Torgersen and Martin Odersky. We’re also grateful for the support of colleagues in the Microsoft Research Programming Principles and Tools group.

Mads Torgorsen and Raj Pai were responsible for making the initial pitch to create Visual F# and the Microsoft Developer Division led by S. Somasegar is responsible for the Visual F# tools. Luke Hoban was the program manager tasked with bringing the F# language and the Visual F# tools to market, including building on the initial momentum and success created by Microsoft Research and ensuring widespread industry adoption for analytical programming. Hoban gained widespread recognition at Microsoft for his work on F# and during 2009 and 2010 took on an increasing leadership role in the team. Tim Ng was engineering lead during this time.

Satnam Singh, David Langworthy and Dave Wecker have been enthusiastic early adopters at Microsoft, as have Lars Nilsson, Artem Prysyazhnuk, Julian Laugel, SooHyoung Oh, optionsScalper, Dru Sellers, Martin Churchill and Adam Granicz externally, some of whom are now driving fantastic F# community initiatives of their own. Mathieu Verbaere, Ran Ettinger and Oege de Moor at Oxford University used early versions of F# on a number of projects, including JunGL. Jack Palevich first took the dive into combining F# with DirectX, leading to many good things in the development of F#.

Damien Watkins, Martin Szummer and Gavin Bierman were regular early co-conspirators in F#-related matters and have given talks and demonstrations on F# at several events. Tom Minka has been a useful colleague (though still programs mostly in C#. John Winn, Tom Melham and Jim Grundy helped inspire the design of F# quotations.